ArtSlant - Current exhibitshttp://www.artslant.com/ny/Events/show
en-us40Rodney Graham - 303 Gallery - May 3rd, 2013 - June 15th, 2013<p>303 Gallery is pleased to present our 7th exhibition of the work of Rodney Graham, and our inaugural exhibition in the gallery's new home at 507 West 24th Street, designed by principal architect StudioMDA with Murdock Solon Architects..</p>
<p>Graham continues his focus on allegorical self-portraiture, inserting himself into variously arcane, humorous, and pathos-ridden scenarios. In "Cactus Fan," Graham imagines himself as the title character of Carl Spitzweg's painting "The Cactus Enthusiast." In the original, a scholar in his study examines a cactus that appears to be peering back at him. In Graham's version, the artist plays a science professor, staring at a cactus with balloons and colored foil attached to it, obviously a birthday or graduation gift he is not particularly excited to receive. The format mimics the Spitzweg original, though the tranquil serenity is upended by the gaudy technicolor features of the cactus and its accoutrements. Graham's buttoned-up professor, arms crossed and starched full-length lab coat in tow, seems to have a moment of disgust with the cactus and all it signifies, as if this limp, potted cactus with balloons represents not only his birthday, but the ridiculous culmination of his life up to this point. The wonderment of Spitzweg's original protagonist, his delight animating nature itself, has been replaced by the stark, cold reality of a middling career and the blighted hope of the unfulfilled.</p>
<p>In "Paddler, Mouth of the Seymour," another lightbox photograph based on a 19th century painting, Graham stars as Max Schmitt in Thomas Eakins' "The Champion Single Sculls (Max Schmitt in a Single Scull)." Graham's boating environment is altogether less idyllic than Eakins' was, as the entropy of time has ravaged most of the joy from the boating excursion, leaving a solitary Graham to interact with a rusty modernist bridge to an industrial park in place of the rolling hills and boating compatriots of the original painting. Graham himself appears a bit weathered and nonplussed, going through the motions for the sake of the picture. In "The Drywaller," Graham stands lackadaisically on stilts, taking a smoke break, with a nod to Abstract Expressionism in the patterns of the primed wall before being coated. "Old Punk on Pay Phone" uses a similar trope, as graffiti creates a kind of color field painting behind the subject. In each of these character-driven scenarios, there is a feeling of dissatisfaction converging in a quiet moment of self-reflection - the artist takes a break, the professor stares listlessly at a gift, the paddler has a breath before embarkation. Each character is at a point past his prime, left to revel in the remnants of his former aspirations. The overarching theme, though, is one of acceptance, as there is always hope to be bestowed on each protagonist: life goes on.</p>
<p>Rodney Graham will present "Torqued Chandelier Release" as a solo exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago from March 8 - June 21, 2013. He has been selected to participate in the 2013 Carnegie International in Pittsburgh and has had recent solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Barcelona; Kunstmuseum, Basel; Hamburger Kunsthalle; Jeu de Paume, Paris; Sprengel Museum, Hannover (where he was the recipient of the Kurt Schwitters Prize), and the BAWAG Foundation in Vienna, Austria. Recent group exhibitions include Under Influences, La Maison Rouge, Paris; Traffic: Conceptual Art in Canada 1965-1980, Vancouver Art Gallery; Imagine the Imaginary, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, FR and 101 Collection: Route 3, CCA Wattis Institute, San Francisco. Graham lives and works in Vancouver.</p>
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Josh Thorpe - 3A Gallery - May 31st, 2013 - June 28th, 2013<p><span style="font-family: helvetica; font-size: small;">Poems about wayward dogs, loose figurations in low light, a large wall painting about a Roman toga. Maybe some ukulele or electric guitar. Doodles, sketches, funny faces, nocturnes. </span></p>
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<p><span style="font-family: helvetica; font-size: small;">Josh Thorpe makes installations, paintings, drawings, music, and texts. He teaches writing at University of Toronto and works at a heritage architecture firm. Recent work includes exhibitions or special projects at Toronto Sculpture Garden, Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Plug In ICA, Printed Matter, and David Roberts Art Foundation, UK. Articles and interviews have been published by Canadian Art, Border Crossings, and the Power Plant, and in 2009 Art Metropole published Thorpe's book, <i>Dan Graham Pavilions: A Guide</i>. In 2011, Thorpe was a finalist in the Toronto Friends of the Visual Arts Artist Award and was elected to the Sobey Art Award Ontario Long List. For images and information, please go to <a href="http://www.joshthorpe.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">www.joshthorpe.com</a>.</span></p>Thu, 16 May 2013 19:44:12 +0000http://www.artslant.com/ny/Events/listhttp://www.artslant.com/ny/Events/list
Gerard Ellis - 532 Gallery Thomas Jaeckel - May 30th, 2013 - July 3rd, 2013<p>A painter and draftsman by calling and choice, Gerard Ellis establishes an interesting dichotomy between the practice of painting and social critique. His pictorial work is highly expressive and vigorous for those who directly or indirectly participate in the multiple strata of the contexts of which this artist speaks. The violence, corruption and lack of willpower characteristic of our times are central topics of his meticulous pictorial work. There is a studied connection and interdependence between what is his work and what constitutes his life experiences, which translates into a certain underlying politicization of life’s experience. Self-referential and sometimes autobiographical, his dynamic yet intensely personal and authentic compositions serve on dual levels; not only are they effective in presenting the viewer with truncated iconoclastic narratives, but they also possess a strong visual vocabulary of technical styles.<strong></strong></p>
<p>Ellis competes in a direct relation to the animal, this time, no longer domestic (an owl, a cybor-dog, among others) with the man and are constant companions to the figures in the paintings. Equipped with a dramatic quality, the plastic movement of each one of the works speaks of speed and stillness, paralysis and aggression, being the diachronic dichotomy of the mental movement of the spectator.</p>
<p>Born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic in 1976, he graduated from the National School of Fine Arts and the Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo. Selected to be part of the “S-Files”, the 6<sup>th</sup> edition of the El Museo del Barrio Biennial in NY, 2011. Has been recognized with three awards of Excellence by The Society of News Design, 2007-2008. In 2007 was invited to be part of the IX edition of the Cuenca International Biennial, Ecuador. His work has been exhibited in group shows in the Nassau County Museum of Art, NY, The IDB Cultural Center and The Mexican Cultural Institute in Washington, D.C. Selected to be part of the National Biennial of Visual Arts and the XX edition of the E. León Jimenes Art Contest (Biennial), where he received the Prize for painting, both in the Dominican Republic. He participated in the “Sarmiento Public Art Project, 2007” in public areas of the city of Santo Domingo.</p>
<p>International contemporary art fairs include: VOLTA NY, Scope, Pinta and Arte BA. His work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach, CA; Fundación para la Pintura, Canaria, Spain; the Museum of Contemporary Drawing and the Museum of Modern Art in Santo Domingo; The Dominican Congress and in private collections in New York, London, Miami, Spain, Panamá, Venezuela, Puerto Rico and Santo Domingo.</p>Mon, 24 Jun 2013 21:57:13 +0000http://www.artslant.com/ny/Events/listhttp://www.artslant.com/ny/Events/list
Jay Shinn - 55 5th Avenue Lobby Exhibitions - June 12th, 2013 - August 31st, 2013<p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>Time Equities Inc. Art-in-Buildings is pleased to announce the newest exhibition in the lobby of the 55 5<sup>th</sup>Avenue Office Tower, Jay Shin: <i>Doublerama and Adagiorama. </i>Please join us for an opening celebration with the artist<i> </i>on Wednesday, June 12<sup>th</sup> from 5-7pm.</b><span style="text-decoration: underline;"></span><span style="text-decoration: underline;"></span></span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: small;">Jay Shinn’s site specific illuminated wall painting, </span><i style="font-size: small;">Doublerama, </i><span style="font-size: small;">challenges the viewer’s experience of the lobby space by confounding the geometry of the main architectural element, a curved wall. Shinn projects light on to wall painting with theatrical lenses to create the illusion of a three dimensional object floating in space. His experiential works are constructed of relatively simple geometric shapes that are deployed in intricate patterns to create origami-like structures. Also on view is </span><i style="font-size: small;">Adagiorana, </i><span style="font-size: small;">an 8-minute looping animation that references the wall painting. This is the first time one of Shinn’s animations has been shone publically. The TV screen is fronted with a frosted Plexiglas box which distorts the video, blurring the line between video and sculpture. </span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: small;">Jay Shinn lives and works in Dallas and New York. He has a BFA in painting from the Kansas City Art Institute. Shinn’s work has been exhibited widely in the US and Europe. Recent exhibitions include Miejska, Bydgoszcz, Poland; University of Colorado Colorado Springs Galleries of Contemporary Art, Colorado Springs; Marty Walker Gallery, Dallas; Barbara Davis Gallery, Houston; Kunstverein Neukolln, Berlin and Mixed Greens, New York. Shinn has completed residencies at Omi International Arts Center and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. His work is represented by Marty Walker Gallery, Dallas and Barbara Davis Gallery, Houston.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><i style="font-size: small;">Jay Shinn: Doublerama and Adagiorama</i><span style="font-size: small;"> is curated by Jennie Lamensdorf and sponsored by the Time Equities Inc. (TEI) Art-in-Buildings. TEI is committed to enriching the experience of our properties through the Art-in-Buildings Program, an innovative approach that brings contemporary art by emerging and mid-career artists to non-traditional exhibition spaces in the interest of promoting artists, expanding the audience for art, and creating a more interesting environment for our building occupants, residents, and their guests.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><br /><span style="font-size: small;">Founded in 1966, privately-held Time Equities Inc. has been in the real estate investment, development and asset &amp; property management business for more than 40 years. With properties in 26 states, four Canadian provinces and Germany, the TEI portfolio consists of approximately 23.4 million square feet of residential, industrial, office and retail property.</span></p>Wed, 12 Jun 2013 06:37:49 +0000http://www.artslant.com/ny/Events/listhttp://www.artslant.com/ny/Events/list
Salman Toor - AICON GALLERY - New York - May 10th, 2013 - June 29th, 2013<p>Aicon Gallery New York is proud to present The Happy Servant, an exhibition of recent works by Salman Toor. Toor’s paintings are an eclectic mix of the exhausted categories of old and new, where inspiration from Old Master painting techniques meld seamlessly with imagery from South Asian mass-media and popular culture, including graphic paintings from local Lahore cinema billboards and contemporary advertising from Bollywood and fashion magazines. The exhibition features a group of eleven paintings exploring the complex and often-uncomfortable relationships between servants and masters. Within these works, Toor transforms signs of poverty and commercial products into heroic symbols and absurdly idealized motifs through the metaphysical qualities of oil paint.<br /> <br /> With Toor’s masterfully whimsical way with paint, these scenes are much more than the literal amalgamation of their commercial sources. Instead, they stage their own private masquerade, cloaking the fantasies of contemporary subjects with a veneer of museum-worthy Old Master virtuosity. The works, however, are not simply an exercise in technical skill, but rather the result of a complicated personal relationship with Western art history, by which the artist has re-interpreted his own place in his native social fabric. For Toor, aspiring towards the vivid scenes and technical perfection of the Renaissance and Baroque masters remains both a feasible and contemporary impulse, capable of yielding unique interpretations of the entrenched tenets of South Asian culture and advertising. In this lens, Toor’s work is set apart in an age of exhausted irony and innumerable iterations of commercial imagery.<br /> <br /> In Girl with Driver, a salmon-colored Honda Civic becomes as luxurious as a silk cravat in an Ingres painting. The artist transforms this common sight in urban Pakistan – a woman in the backseat with a male driver up front – from its quotidian origins into an allegory of the humdrum of the present and the venerable painting of the past, simultaneously beautiful and grotesque. However, Toor’s realism is selective, which can be seen in the fantastical luminosity of the colors and stylized anatomy of the figures, while visual clichés - the woman smelling a flower from the car side – provide a running commentary of the absurd social subtexts of such a scene. The composition and typecast figures in this and other works are culled from the ubiquitous advertisements for jewelry, beauty products (‘Fairness Creams’), new shopping malls and cell phone providers dominating Pakistan’s urban media landscape.<br /> <br /> Both The Rickshaw Driver's Dream and Driver and Maid depict fantastic scenes of personal and collective wish-fulfilment through an impossible combination of visual references and cultural stereotypes, including the famous group dances of Bollywood musicals and the painted covers for Mills and Boon romance novels from the 1970s. The Rickshaw Driver borrows its compostion from Titian's Three Ages of Man (circa 16th century Venice), which itself was most likely influenced by Giorgioni’s themes and motifs of landscapes and nude figures. In Toor’s work, this familiar scene of idyllic romance is pushed over the edge into Bollywood pathos by the presence of ever-ready backup dancers, who have spontaneously broken into their routine in support of the “leading couple.” In this cinematic trope, the class differences that typically dominate South Asian society are instantaneously dissolved and cooks, gardeners, landlords and drivers all rejoice in choreographed triumph for a singular imaginary couple. As a result, it highlights the comedically absurd nature of mass-marketed culture and advertising in modern-day India and Pakistan that often serves to mask a much darker social reality.<br /> <br /> Similarly, poverty oscillates between caricature and reverence in The Happy Servant, while The Happy Sweeper brushes away in a sentimental Disneyland of daisies and four-leaf clovers. In both works, one senses the inherent isolation of the central figure in an otherwise carelessly jubilant gathering or classically-inspired milieu. Further emphasizing this skewed reality in both works are the subjects’ frozen smiles, which exude a foreboding quality slithering under a skin of frivolity. <br /> <br /> In all his works, Toor deftly presents a subtle melding of the consumeristic and social fantasies perpetuated by the mass-media of urban India and Pakistan, along with a Renaissace-era spirit of light, technique and idealis. This collaboration presents a unique vision of the complexities and exchanges between South Asian popular culture and the art historical traditions of Western idealization. Salman Toor (b. 1983) lives and works between New York and Karachi, Pakistan. This is his first solo exhibition in New York.</p>Tue, 25 Jun 2013 01:47:30 +0000http://www.artslant.com/ny/Events/listhttp://www.artslant.com/ny/Events/list
Group Show - AICON GALLERY - New York - May 10th, 2013 - June 22nd, 2013<p>The exhibition looks back though the history of post-independence Indian and Pakistani photography, from its early modernist interpretations through today, presenting a vast panoramic view of South Asia's complex past, present and future.</p>Sun, 05 May 2013 03:42:27 +0000http://www.artslant.com/ny/Events/listhttp://www.artslant.com/ny/Events/list
Jorge Macchi - Alexander and Bonin - May 4th, 2013 - June 15th, 2013<p>Alexander and Bonin is pleased to announce <em>Loop</em>, the first one person exhibition by Jorge Macchi in New York.<br /> <br /> For this exhibition Macchi will divide the gallery into three spaces. Each space will contain works which manifest the measure of time and reiterate its extension in space through a series of projections, objects and watercolors. Jorge Macchi’s finely tuned vocabulary results in works which are simultaneously poetic and uncanny.<br /> <br /> Time stands still in a number of Macchi’s recent works. <em>Pendulum</em>, 2013 a curved I-beam supported by two plastic stools, appears to buckle under its own weight. As the title suggests, this tensile irregularity also demarcates the path of a pendulum’s swing, as if to solidify the infinite number of repetitive momentary positions of its arc. <em>First Second, </em>2013 employs a similar logic, capturing a moment in a material. Macchi has cast the narrow wedge between the hour marking twelve and the tick of the first second on a clock’s face in concrete. This cast triangle renders space-time solid while at the same time leaving open the possibility of development, like a step on a spiral staircase of simultaneity.<br /> <br /> The video installation, <em>XYZ</em>, 2012 will occupy the rear space of the gallery. The image of a station clock with hands frozen is projected in such a way that the three hands rest perfectly into the seams of the corner of a darkened room. In his work Macchi fuses architecture, space and time into a simple yet unfamiliar congress.<br /> <br /> The two-channel video projection <em>From Here to Eternity, </em>2013 will be shown on the gallery’s second floor.<br /> This work is the most recent collaboration between the artist and the musician Edgardo Rudnitzky. Two clips were extracted from the classic Hollywood film: the first from the opening title sequence and the second while the words ‘THE END’ appear on the screen. The clips have slightly different lengths creating a chaotic sound mixture and are combined with a third audio channel in real time using notes from the original soundtracks and from music sung by women.<br /> <br /> Jorge Macchi was born in 1963 in Buenos Aires where he continues to live and work. Since the mid-1980s, his work has been shown throughout the Americas and Europe. Currently, ten large-scale installation works from 2007–2013 are being shown in ‘Container’ a one-person exhibition at the Kunstmuseum, Lucerne. In 2011, his work was the subject of a survey exhibition, ‘Music Stands Still’ at the Museum of Contemporary Art (SMAK) in Ghent. His work was represented in the 11<sup>th</sup> Biennale de Lyon (2011); the 12<sup>th</sup> Istanbul Biennial (2011); ‘All of this and nothing’, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2010); ‘Brave New Worlds’ at the Walker Art Center (2007). In 2005, Jorge Macchi, in collaboration with Edgardo Rudnitzky, represented Argentina at the Venice Biennale. His installation for the 2012 Liverpool Biennial, <em>Refraction </em>will be exhibited in June in the Art Unlimited section of Art Basel.</p>Fri, 07 Jun 2013 00:53:06 +0000http://www.artslant.com/ny/Events/listhttp://www.artslant.com/ny/Events/list
Regina Silveira - Alexander Gray Associates - June 5th, 2013 - July 26th, 2013<p>Regina Silveira (b.1939) was born in Porto Alegre, Brazil and is currently based in São Paulo. In the 1950s she began her artistic training under the tutelage of expressionist Brazilian painter Iberê Camargo, studying lithography and woodcut, as well as painting. Renowned for her parodic explorations of space through geometric constructs, Silveiraʼs work is celebrated for both its conceptual rigor and formal impact.<br /> <br /> During the 1970s she experimented with printmaking and video, engaging with the dynamic developments of the Brazilian art world at the time. For more than thirty years, Silveira has been investigating the ways in which reality is represented, and the ways the meaning of visual imagery is deconstructed and understood. She has used various methods of perspectival projection, including skiagraphia (the study of shadows). Silveira is particularly interested in the paradoxical relationship between presence and absence, a notion that she has investigated by incorporating tracks and foot imprints into her visual vocabulary. For Silveira, printmaking has always been a field open to graphic experimentation, much more expansive and flexible than painting. Her practice, informed by printing techniques, has taken the form of videos, sculptures, and spacial interventions of architectural proportions. Silveira’s artwork was the subject of a retrospective at the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil; in 2009, the Koge Museum of Art in Public Spaces, Denmark, presented a retrospective of Silveira’s public projects. The artist has exhibited throughout Europe and the Americas, including solo exhibitions at the Museo de Antioquia, Medelin, Colombia (2008); Centro Cultural do Banco Brasil, Brasilia (2007); Pacific Northwest College of Art, Portland, OR (2007); Museo de Arte del Banco de la Republica, Bogota, Colombia (2007); Museu de Arte da Pampulha, Belo Horizonte, Brazil (2007); Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain (2005); Art Museum of the Americas, Washington, DC (2000); Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires, Argentina (1998); Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA (1996); Bass Museum, Miami, FL (1992); Queens Museum of Art, New York (1992). Her work is represented in public and private collections internationally.</p>Tue, 28 May 2013 00:25:22 +0000http://www.artslant.com/ny/Events/listhttp://www.artslant.com/ny/Events/list
Sarah Braman, Wallace Whitney - American Contemporary - May 1st, 2013 - June 16th, 2013<p><i>Contact High </i>invokes a certain ‘greater than the sum of its parts’ joy owing to the history of artist friends Sarah Braman and Wallace Whitney. While idiosyncratically themselves, they are aware of the ways they have influenced each other and their art since first showing together in the late 90s. Their mutual appreciation, easy dialogue and thoughtful consideration of one another’s work open up a channel for a compelling structure of feeling to emerge. In <i>Contact High </i>Braman<i> </i>positions a small desk of cast aluminum plywood for an imaginary being to sit and contemplate<i> </i>Whitney’s painting. In this way the tone of the painting lends itself to the sculpture and in turn, viewing the paintings through and around the sculpture offers the opportunity to experience color, atmosphere, volume and perhaps one’s body in a new way.</p>
<p>Braman incorporates a variety of materials in her sculptures—cardboard, colored acrylic glass, found furniture, car parts and simple fabricated cubes—that chase to lock down moments she is reluctant to let go of. The soft cardboard absorbs paint, the glass conducts transparent color and the found objects provide psychically complicated information that contributes to the dynamism of the often tipped and tilted shapes. </p>
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<p>Whitney makes paintings rooted in the visual perception of an outdoorsy type space, recollected or collaged from surrounding infrastructure. There is a deep investment in oil paint as a material with a loaded history: an investment converted into paintings remarkably full of air. Dynamic drawing and at times aggressive slashing create soaring overpass structures underpinning the lyrical meditations and strong emotions. </p>
<p> Braman and Whitney present a metaphysical skepticism held in check by classical considerations of light, form and space. Like a long drive, the work pushes forward towards something in a landscape, a quotidian sublime grounded by the clunk and funk of a thing prized beyond its obsolescence. </p>
<p><i>SB</i>: Whit’s paintings are very physical, but bring me into a spiritual or emotional landscape as well. I admire that and would love for things I make to operate on this level.</p>
<p> <i>WW</i>: Sarah and I have known each other for a long time and I really respect her approach to making a sculpture. I like thinking about seeing one of my paintings through and around one of her sculptures and having one of the paintings being a ‘backdrop’ for her sculpture. </p>
<p>Sarah Braman has had solo institutional shows MACRO in Rome, Italy and Le Conforts Moderne, France. She has also exhibited at Mitchell Innes and Nash, NY, International Art Object, LA, 179/The Zabludowicz Collection (in London, New York and Finland) and MoMA/PS1, NY. She received her MFA from Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia in 1998, and her BFA from Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore in 1992. She is one of the founders of Canada Gallery.</p>
<p> Wallace Whitney (b. 1969, Boston, MA) lives and works in the Bronx, NY. He received a MFA from Bard College, NY and a BA from Hampshire College, MA. He has exhibited in Europe and the US. Exhibitions include: Gallerie Bernard Ceysson, France and Luxembourg, Canada Gallery, NY, Horton Gallery, NY, and Gavin Brown’s Enterprise. He is one of the founders of Canada Gallery.</p>Fri, 26 Apr 2013 01:47:51 +0000http://www.artslant.com/ny/Events/listhttp://www.artslant.com/ny/Events/list
Bill Traylor - American Folk Art Museum - June 11th, 2013 - September 22nd, 2013<p style="text-align: justify;">This exhibition will include approximately 63 drawings and paintings by self-taught Alabama artist Bill Traylor. Traylor began making art near the end of his life, and his works are notable for their flat, simply defined shapes and vibrant compositions in which memories and observations relating to African American life are merged. Traylor is recognized as one of the finest American artists of the 20th century.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">&ldquo;Bill Traylor: Drawings from the Collections of the High Museum of Art and the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts&rdquo; is co-organized by the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, and the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, Montgomery. The exhibition is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.<br /> <br /> The presentation at the American Folk Art Museum is sponsored in part by Joyce Berger Cowin, public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, the Ford Foundation, the Robert Lehman Foundation, the David Davies and Jack Weeden Fund for Exhibitions, and Laura and Richard Parsons. Lectures and symposia are supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.</p>Sat, 07 Sep 2013 14:33:09 +0000http://www.artslant.com/ny/Events/listhttp://www.artslant.com/ny/Events/list
Bill Traylor - American Folk Art Museum - June 11th, 2013 - September 22nd, 2013<p>Bill Traylor (c. 1854–1949) forged a personal iconography of recurring characters and subjects. They exhibit the artist’s photographic memory by recalling images, sounds, or movements with clear precision. In their protean nature, these subconscious fragments return in multiple drawings, forming interrelated sequences in a single feature that offer significant parallels with cinematic production and its images in motion. Late in his life, the street scene in Montgomery itself contributed a kind of cinema verité, adding a fertile complexity to themes that beg to be thought of together, stakeholders in a continuous, coherent scene. In this regard no detail is superficial but is always connected to an ongoing dynamic cycle.<br /> <br /> “Traylor in Motion: Wonders from New York Collections” delves into this aspect of Traylor’s vision by considering specific groups of figures and gestures and their implications: the development of action through staged poses—subjects mostly looking right, with expressive pointed fingers; the tension created by offset spatial compositions; the introduction of vibrant colors; startling metamorphoses; and the sinuous movement of bodies from contortion to the astonishing balletic extension of a limb. High-kicking legs evoke the exuberance of such dances of the era as the gymnastic Lindy Hop. But such posturing may also be a sly reference to the satirical strut of the “cakewalk,” a subversive plantation dance that mocked the formal grand marches and minuets of the slaveholders through exaggerated movements. Often the women wore long dresses with hoop skirts and the men sported high hats, split-tail coats, and walking sticks.<br /> <br /> These moving images become lines of force: jumps and ellipses between cause and effect, stirring up the surfaces. Yet the ritualistic cinema created by Traylor is not a strict narrative, social commentary, or reaction to historical fact. Mysterious and intimate, it carries a reinvented perception of reality laden with fantasies, myths, and symbols.</p>Sun, 09 Jun 2013 23:25:09 +0000http://www.artslant.com/ny/Events/listhttp://www.artslant.com/ny/Events/list
- American Folk Art Museum - June 11th, 2013 - September 22nd, 2013<p>The exhibition is sponsored in part by Joyce Berger Cowin, public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, the Ford Foundation, the Robert Lehman Foundation, the David Davies and Jack Weeden Fund for Exhibitions, and Laura and Richard Parsons. Lectures and symposia are supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.</p>Sun, 09 Jun 2013 23:29:07 +0000http://www.artslant.com/ny/Events/listhttp://www.artslant.com/ny/Events/list
Xul Solar, Jorge Luis Borges - Americas Society Gallery - April 18th, 2013 - July 20th, 2013<p><em>Xul Solar and Jorge Luis Borges: The Art of Friendship </em>is an exhibition that explores friendship as a cosmopolitan agency, which informed Argentine art and culture through the intellectual exchange between the mystic artist Xul Solar (1887-1963) and the writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1985.) <em>The Art of Friendship</em> focuses on the fraternal dialogue and collaborations between Solar and Borges, the most singular cultural figures in Buenos Aires in the twentieth century who contributed to the philosophical and aesthetic renewal in Argentina in the 1920s by cultivating a form of “fluid nationalism.” The exhibition is curated by Gabriela Rangel, Director of Visual Arts and Chief Curator at Americas Society with the collaboration of poet Lila Zemborain and the assistance of Christina De León and Anya Pantuyeva. It will be on view from April 18 through July 20, 2013 travelling in the fall to the Phoenix Art Museum. For Gabriela Rangel, “Xul Solar and Jorge Luis Borges were central to the process of invention of a local universal identity, which seems paradoxical, but is rather extraordinary and unique.”</p>
<p>The exhibition covers over forty years of friendship between Solar and Borges, who met after their return from Europe in 1924, in the literary and artistic circles of the journal-magazine <em>Martin Fierro</em> and collaborated on different projects until Solar’s death in 1963. In the search of a new Argentine avant-garde identity, Borges and Solar, along with other <em>martinfierristas</em> developed a Neo-Creole identity that fused the tactics of the European modernists with nationalist ideas and the <em>gaucho</em> vernacular culture. Nonetheless, each developed distinct voices within this group: Borges reinventing the slums and unpaved streets of Buenos Aires’ suburbs, and Xul creating new languages Neo-Creole and Pan-Language as well as fantastic landscapes filled with monstrous figures in which he blended mystic and occult references with Pan-American symbolism. As Sylvia Molloy has suggested, Borges and Solar seek difference rather than assimilation acting as born-exiles in an environment of fervent avant-garde debates and nationalisms. Both constituted a visual metaphor that built the core for this new conception of the local cosmopolitan self. During their countless walks around the city, chess games, and while listening to music the two discussed the poetry and art of William Blake, the mysticism of Emanuel Swedenborg, theology of angels, German Idealism, and non-Western religions and languages. Borges and Solar forged a lifetime friendship while discovering and contributing to the identity of Buenos Aires in the process of the invention of their own.</p>
<p><em>The Art of Friendship</em> departs from a speculative lineage on friendship construed by thinkers such as Aristotle, Cicero, Michel de Montaigne, Friedrich Nietzsche, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Rorty, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Jacques Derrida who have examined fraternal exchange as an instance of civic agency. Friendship is also considered as a space of social and political interaction, which enables the tracing of genealogical maps that identify vast networks of solidarity and communities.</p>
<p>The show gathers an important number of paintings, first editions, and manuscripts—some of which have never left Argentina—as a means to explore the intellectual nature of the relationship between Solar and Borges and the definition of friendship at large as a private agency with public effects. <em>Xul Solar and Jorge Luis Borges: The Art of Friendship</em> is organized by Americas Society with the collaboration of Museo Xul Solar in Buenos Aires. It is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with contributions by Patricia Artundo, Sergio Baur, Maria Kodama, Gabriela Rangel and Sylvia Molloy, in addition to a plaquette with original poems by Monica de La Torre, Cecilia Vicuña, and Lila Zemborain inspired by Solar’s astral voyages or <em>San Signos</em>.</p>Fri, 05 Jul 2013 01:43:13 +0000http://www.artslant.com/ny/Events/listhttp://www.artslant.com/ny/Events/list
Wolf Kahn - Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe - June 6th, 2013 - July 26th, 2013<p>AMERINGER | McENERY | YOHE is pleased to announce an exhibition of recent paintings by Wolf Kahn. The exhibition will open 6 June 2013. A reception for the artist will take place 6 June, between 6:00 and 8:00 PM. The public is welcome.</p>
<p>The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with an essay by Nicholas Delbanco.</p>Sun, 21 Jul 2013 00:13:34 +0000http://www.artslant.com/ny/Events/listhttp://www.artslant.com/ny/Events/list
Wolfgang Tillmans - Andrea Rosen Gallery - May 4th, 2013 - June 15th, 2013<p>After a year that saw Wolfgang Tillmans' work presented in six significant solo museum survey exhibitions at the Kunsthalle Zurich; São Paulo Museum of Modern Art; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Museo de Arte del Banco de la República, Bogota; Kunstsammlung NRW (K21), Düsseldorf; and the Museo de Arte de Lima (MALI), Peru, we are excited to announce Wolfgang Tillmans' eleventh one person exhibition at the gallery. The exhibition titled from Neue Welt consists of carefully chosen works from a four-year project begun in 2008, which culminated in Tillmans' 2012 exhibition at the Kunsthalle Zurich and in the publication <i>Neue Welt</i> published by Taschen in 2012. The exhibition will also include a wall of 128 pages from Tillmans' newest book <i>FESPA Digital / FRUIT LOGISTICA</i> published by Walther König in 2012. Few artists have the ability to not only contribute to the cultural landscape, but to actually redefine the lens through which that culture is apprehended. <br /> <br /> <i>"Through combining production modes of making and presenting (at once creative, analytic, interpretive), and by inhabiting the roles of photographer, curator, designer, critic, and historian all under the rubric of artist, Tillmans occupies a rare if not singular position in the field of contemporary art."</i><br /> -Julie Ault, <i>"The Subject is Exhibition,"</i> Yale University Press, 2006<br /> <br /> <i>"If a technique existed that could print out my visual memories of the last years, I guess it would to some degree look like a faux Tillmans retrospective. And I don't believe this experience is limited to myself."</i><br /> -Jan Verwoert, <i>"Survey,"</i> Phaidon Press, 2002<br /> <br /> Tillmans' career has been marked by a remarkable ability to continually expand the scope of his work. His practice develops in ways both obvious and subtle, not just in new images, but also in the paper, framing devices, size, and the printing technology utilized in the prints. After two decades of consistently sized prints, the most readily visible changes in this exhibition will be new sizes of work as well as new inkjet paper and ink that leads to works of remarkable color, physicality, and intensity. The radicality of Tillmans' practice is premised not on the rupture from one project to another, but in a continual reinvention and translation of his own image making. Over time, bodies of work intertwine and earlier works are consistently integrated so that new exhibitions are not merely forums for new pictures, but sites where the adjacency of images can create new meaning. The uncanny ability of a Tillmans photograph to feel relevant whether made in the early 1990s, at the turn of the 21st century, or today is a testament to his unique ability.<br /> <br /> <i>"I wanted to know: How does the world appear twenty years after I've begun to form a picture of it? Can there be a 'new' view of it? And 'new' also in the sense of greatly expanded technical possibilities. The tremendous political and economic shifts of recent years, and technical advancements, have considerably altered the world's appearance."</i> <br /> -Wolfgang Tillmans, interview with Beatrix Ruf, Taschen, 2012<br /> <br /> Reflecting an increasingly globalized world, the works in this exhibition picture a massively expanded geographic range from the United States and Europe to Asia, the Middle East, Africa and the farthest reaches of the planet including Tasmania and the southernmost tip of South America. These works not only react to the implied accessibility of place in the 21st century, but reflect Tillmans' desire to bring to light political and economic realities.<br /> <br /> <i>"When do things become visible? What can pictures make visible?"</i><br /> -Wolfgang Tillmans, <i>Manual</i>, Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2007<br /> <br /> Tillmans' work not only addresses what subjects can be brought to the fore, but questions the nature of perception itself and the tools and apparatuses that generate images. From his earliest days using a standard, commercial photocopier, Tillmans has always embraced the accessible and democratic potential of new technologies rather than deploying technology as spectacle—to make work more removed from a lived reality. Even now, having made the natural switch to incorporate more digital technology, Tillmans seeks out the very edges of his medium. Recently, in an interview with Michelle Kuo in Artforum, Tillmans addressed not only the implications of the rapid changes in inkjet printing technology, but also the arbitrary parameters of medium and what it might mean that these boundaries are so vigorously defended.<br /> <br /> <i>"These shifts, some chosen, some forced on us by technological development, shouldn't be seen as a threat. They are profoundly exciting."</i> <br /> -Wolfgang Tillmans, interview with Michelle Kuo, <i>Artforum,</i> 2012<br /> <br /> A Tillmans exhibition is always a manifestation of the extreme rigor with which he approaches his practice, both on a conceptual and a technical level. In his eleventh exhibition at the gallery, Tillmans continues his relentless project to make work that is urgent, meaningful, and critical, so that it can be as inspiring to us as the world is to him.<br /> <br /> <i>"The search, or research, that is his praxis seems to be sustained by a fundamental belief in the world and its potential for change. Every picture, every exhibition, every publication is required to create a situation whereby—in the contact between the pictorial objects and the public, from the individual viewer to the great mass of those with an interest in art—those present sense the possibility of change, of a new becoming."</i><br /> -Tom Holert, <i>"The Unforeseen,"</i> Moderna Museet, 2012<br /> <br /> <br /> Born in Remscheid, Germany, in 1968, Wolfgang Tillmans lives and works in Berlin and London. Tillmans was awarded the prestigious Turner Prize from the Tate in 2000. Since his last exhibition at Andrea Rosen Gallery in 2010, Tillmans' work has been published in four monographs: <i>Abstract Pictures</i> (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2011), <i>Zacheta Ermutigung</i> (Warsaw: Zachęta National Gallery of Art, 2011), <i>FESPA Digital / FRUIT LOGISTICA</i> (Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2012), and <i>Neue Welt</i> (Cologne: Taschen, 2012). Taschen has also released a limited Art Edition publication of the <i>Neue Welt,</i> with 72 Tillmans photographs, printed on 24 folded sheets; this signed and numbered portfolio available in an edition of 500 is the first oversized Tillmans publication to date. His work can be found internationally in collections including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art; The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; The Hirshhorn Museum, Washington; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Tate Gallery, London; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; The Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Centre Pompidou, Paris among many others. A significant installation of his work is currently on view at MoMA on the Second Floor Contemporary Galleries.</p>Fri, 14 Jun 2013 03:21:20 +0000http://www.artslant.com/ny/Events/listhttp://www.artslant.com/ny/Events/list
Lynda Benglis, Sean Bluechel, Jean Dubuffet, Mika Rottenberg, Axel Salto - Andrea Rosen Gallery 2 - May 4th, 2013 - June 22nd, 2013<p>For Mika Rottenberg's current exhibition at Magasin 3, she produced an impressive and arresting group of sculptures — cast resin and hand-painted textures that seem to have been ripped from the walls of one of her film sets. These sculptures reference an iconic tactility that is key to all of her films and installations. Since Gallery 2's program is committed to encouraging alternative modes for understanding new and historical material through filters that may alter our perception, Andrea Rosen Gallery is delighted to announce a complex new group exhibition that juxtaposes Rottenberg's sculptures with the evocative surfaces of works by Lynda Benglis, Sean Bluechel, Jean Dubuffet, and mid-century ceramicist Axel Salto. <br /> <br /> An important painting from Dubuffet's Texturologie series avoids all figuration, but is not abstract. Literally a vast view of the ground seen from above, the gestural and gritty painting was intended to evoke a continuous, infinite space beyond the fragmented sphere of human action and intervention. Sean Bluechel prefers this dysfunctional arena, and his "Drunk Photos" engage multiple iconographies of sexuality, race and gender with a rough, physical sensibility. Axel Salto experimented with wild, organic forms and colors that were a radical departure from the prevailing, cool abstract styles of modern ceramics. Although his vessels are undoubtedly decorative, Salto was a trained painter fixated on formal problems – how does the thickness and sheen of a glaze change as it slides over bumps and into grooves? The dense, multi-colored accretions on Lynda Benglis's wax paintings are sensuous and visceral, but they are also ground-breaking, transitional pieces that demonstrate the artist's struggle to redefine painting and the relationship between the artwork and viewer in space. <br /> <br /> All of these works give form to our sensory perceptions. As Lynda Benglis said, "I am involved with bodily response so that the viewer has the feeling of being one with the material and that action, both visually and muscularly…in other words, you draw out the complete body through the work." </p>Tue, 30 Apr 2013 22:00:51 +0000http://www.artslant.com/ny/Events/listhttp://www.artslant.com/ny/Events/list